The complete guide

to Atlassian for ITSM

Reimagine ways of working across IT delivery,
operations, and support
Contents

4 Introduction
6 About Atlassian
9 Atlassian’s approach to ITSM
13 Getting started with Atlassian’s ITSM solution

15 Service delivery
16 IT business management
25 Change enablement
42 Service configuration management
47 Knowledge management

51 Service operations
52 Incident management
67 Problem management

72 Service support
73 Request management
83 Asset management
91 Enterprise service management

95 Resources
96 Atlassian Team Playbook and IT guides
98 Extend your ITSM solution with Marketplace Apps
100 Enterprise services
101 Atlassian’s cheat sheet for high-velocity ITSM
104 About the authors

THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO ATLASSIAN FOR ITSM 2

 01
Introduction
Introduction
We live in amazing times. The world is moving at breakneck
speed, from super quantum computing to artificial
intelligence to self-driving cars. Enterprises across every
industry — from traditional banks to pizza delivery — are
undergoing massive digital transformation powered
by software. At the same time, customers have higher
expectations for on-demand services than ever before.
When the risk of downtime means billions in lost revenue
and customer backlash, the stakes of missing customer
expectations for availability and performance are higher
than ever. What’s more, the rise of the knowledge worker
in enterprises demands instant access to information and
ways to be productive.

INTRODUCTION 4
There’s so much at stake, and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.
Yet bounded by complex processes and expensive modules, legacy
tools are inflexible and hard to adapt in the face of increasingly
dynamic business and technology needs. Siloed systems impose
friction and constrain knowledge sharing across teams and modern
tools. The growth of modern methodologies like DevOps is putting
additional pressure on IT teams to accelerate workflows and
reconsider their cultural practices.

As the rise of software-powered services accelerates, IT leaders

face a unique opportunity to help their organizations navigate
this transformation. You stand at the center of this modernization
that’s happening across the entire business, from prioritizing and
managing demand, to creating seamless processes for internal
business teams. There’s nothing in an enterprise that isn’t running
on IT services. The time is now to evolve traditional approaches and
lead your teams in navigating transformation and adopting modern
ways of working.

In this guide, we’re excited to share how Atlassian can support

you and your teams on your journey as changemakers. Based
on our experience working with leading enterprises, we’ll share
best practices on how to reimagine your core ITSM practices by
combining team-centric practices with Atlassian’s best-of-breed
ITSM solution.

Jenna Cline,
Head of IT Strategy & Programs, Atlassian

INTRODUCTION 5
About Atlassian
At Atlassian, we know teams, and what makes them work better, together.
We provide the technology backbone with the most critical collaborative
workflows — agile project planning, incident management, and response,
and service management and support — to help modern IT organizations
collaboratively plan, manage and operate, service and support.

Our solution helps teams:

· Deliver transformational technologies with proven agile workflows

· Manage and operate always-on services with unified incident response

· Delight customers with simply powerful service management and support

· Foster a culture of collaboration and trust across all teams

INTRODUCTION 6
Jira Service Management unlocks
high-velocity teams with everything
they need to get started fast with
PinkVERIFY-certified ITSM practices,
such as request, incident, problem, and
change management. Offer diverse
teams self-service support via a self-
service portal, agent queues, SLAs, and
multi-channel chat support (with Halp).
Easily set up automation to accelerate
the flow of work and reduce manual
work. Rapidly respond to, resolve, and
continuously learn from incidents
with on-call scheduling, routing rules,
and escalation policies, powered by
Opsgenie. Integrate with software
development tools to improve the
flow of changes to infrastructure and
services while minimizing risk. And, if
your software teams use Jira Software,
you can link IT tickets to the dev team’s
backlog to get to the root cause of
problems before they escalate.
Insight (now by Atlassian) offers flexible
asset and configuration management,
built on the Jira platform. Store assets in
Insight to manage inventory efficiently,
track ownership and lifecycles, and
reduce costs. Gain visibility into the
infrastructure that supports critical
applications and services. Use Insight
to understand and visualize service
dependencies so you can minimize risk.
INTRODUCTION
Jira Software is the #1 software
development tool used by agile teams
— with customizable requirement
types, workflows, permissions, and
notifications. It provides virtual scrum
and kanban boards for teams to
collaboratively and visually manage
backlogs, track the progress of work,
and use real-time reports. IT teams
can use Jira Software to organize large
change management projects and
problem management initiatives, or
with even routine maintenance tasks.
This is especially helpful for teams who
organize their work in sprints or want
to visualize their tasks to be done with
scrum and kanban boards.
Confluence is a collaborative workspace
that changes how modern teams
work. Teams can create anything from
meeting notes to project plans and
product requirements. Create a space
for every team, department, or major
project to share knowledge and organize
work. Use a structured hierarchy and
a powerful search engine to find work
quickly and easily, and leave feedback
with commenting. For ITSM, Confluence
is a knowledge base for teams to
organize FAQs and documentation, as
well as a team workspace to share best
practices.
7

Statuspage lets IT teams report on the
real-time status of all IT services, giving
the whole company one dedicated
dashboard for customers and employees
to check on status information and
subscribe to relevant notifications.
With Statuspage, IT managers reduce
the volume of inbound support tickets
while internal stakeholders get the
information they need pushed directly
via SMS and email. Statuspage takes the
hassle out of incident communication
and is trusted by IT teams within top
Fortune 500 companies.
Bitbucket is the Git solution for
professional teams. Bitbucket makes it
easy for teams to collaborate using pull
requests, inline comments, diff views,
and powerful integrations. Bitbucket
scales as your team grows, and works
well with the tools you already use to
help your teams build better software
with CI/CD, apps, APIs, and the best Jira
integration on the market.
Jira Align connects business and
technology teams to align strategy and
business requirements with technical
execution at enterprise scale. Mission,
Vision, Values, Strategies & OKRs are
connected to the actual work being
done. As ideas and large bundles of
work enter, work remains linked to
INTRODUCTION
a corresponding strategy to support
full alignment between the business,
technology, and product management
organizations. Furthermore, work
delivered is measured against outcomes
to inform ongoing prioritization and
decision-making.
Trello
Trello improves cross-team
collaboration and breaks down barriers,
offering a visual way for business and
IT teams to collaborate on any project.
Trello provides information at a glance
where teams can see the big picture,
or dive into the details, all on one Trello
board. It enables these teams to get out
of email and communicate where the
work is getting done. Everyone knows
the status of tasks as cards move across
lists to Done.
The Atlassian Marketplace empowers
teams to customize Atlassian products
with thousands of different apps and
integrations. Tailor your tools to suit the
way your teams work with apps that
offer additional functionality and
integrations that allow you to plug
into your existing tools to gain greater
end to end visibility. Extend your ITSM
solution with best-of-breed apps across
categories such as asset management
and CMDB, automation, advanced
reporting, and more.
8
Atlassian’s approach to ITSM
Atlassian’s mission is to help unleash the potential of every team. We believe
that behind every great human achievement, there is a team. But great
teamwork requires more than just the tools and products used by the team. It
also involves the culture and practices teams follow to get work done.

That’s why our approach to ITSM begins with teams at the center and
combines strong culture, proven practices, and collaborative tools to help IT
teams achieve their full potential.

Building a strong culture with the Atlassian Team Playbook

Changing your organization’s culture can be daunting, and it usually doesn’t
happen overnight. But through small, incremental steps, impacting the culture
on your team is possible. Start with developing a set of “plays” for working
through common problems. Based on years of research and experimenting
with an open way of working in our organization, we created the Atlassian
Team Playbook. These step-by-step techniques and exercises remove the
naturally-occurring friction teams face, such as assessing your team’s health,
learning through retrospectives, making high-impact decisions, and more. We
even developed IT-specific plays to help service and incident response teams
become more agile.

INTRODUCTION 9
Developing proven practices inspired by ITIL 4

When it comes to practices, ITIL 4, the latest update of the widely used
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) framework, is a valuable guide. While ITIL has
led the ITSM industry with guidance and training for over 30 years, the newest
version brings ITIL into the broader context of customer experience, value
streams, and digital transformation, as well as embraces modern ways of
working, such as agile and DevOps. One significant change is shifting the
interpretation of overly-prescriptive “processes” to more flexible and holistic
“practices.” ITIL 4 puts service management practices into a strategic context
by incorporating service management, development, operations, business
relationships, governance, and even culture. For organizations using ITIL 4 as
a reference, Atlassian’s ITSM solution enables organizations to adopt new,
modern practices that fit their needs and deliver higher value to the business.

Unlocking teams with a high-velocity ITSM solution

Built and extended from Jira, the engine for agile work practices for millions of
users, Jira Service Management unlocks IT at high-velocity. Empowered teams
deliver great service experiences with processes that are continually adapted
to their needs. Teams can see and coordinate efforts for more impact through
Jira’s open platform for work. And integrated, streamlined workflows across
development and operations speed both delivery and support at scale.

INTRODUCTION 10
Atlassian unites teams on one platform: Bringing delivery,
operations and support into one collaborative experience.

· With Jira Service Management at the core, IT teams, across infrastructure,

operations, and workplace support, enjoy a team-centric IT support
workspace that matches the way they work with flexible ITIL workflows,
a self-service portal, agent queues, automation, SLAs, custom dashboards,
and much more.

· Through powerful incident swarming and on-call alerting capabilities

(from our popular Opsgenie product), teams have modern incident
management workflows to proactively respond, resolve, and learn from
every incident.

· Insight offers a flexible asset and configuration management solution –

built on Jira – to automatically discover, map, store, and manage assets.

· Strong integrations with Jira Software and Bitbucket brings development

and IT teams together using a common platform to speed service
requests through to changes and releases.

· Confluence provides the backbone for knowledge management, providing

real-time collaboration and access to support articles, troubleshooting
guides, runbooks, templates and more.

· Statuspage is the easiest way to communicate incidents and scheduled

maintenance to end-users to help reduce support burden and build trust
with every incident.

· Outside of IT, the adoption of Jira Service Management spreads quickly to

business teams, such as HR, Facilities, and Legal, who recognize the value
of easily managing and tracking their flow of work.

· Finally, further customize and extend your solution with best-of-breed

apps, such as scripting, time tracking, and advanced analytics, from the
Atlassian Marketplace.

INTRODUCTION 11
 Discover the business impact of Jira Service Management

According to Forrester Consulting’s Total Economic Impact™ report on

Atlassian for ITSM, companies gain considerable value from day one:

246%
ROI
61%
Improvement
$819 K
in savings from
in agent retiring legacy
productivity ITSM tools

Learn more

INTRODUCTION 12
Getting started with
Atlassian’s ITSM solution
Setting a solid foundation before embarking on any journey is critical for
success. We recommend these best practices as you get started with Atlassian:

1 Embrace a team-centric approach to ITSM

At Atlassian, we believe that open teams work better together. Many IT teams
believe they’re using the “right” tools and following the “right” processes,
but still fail to achieve results. In fact, these tools and processes can actually
create inefficiencies, for example, between IT and Dev teams due to silos and
lack of knowledge sharing. We found at Atlassian that establishing a culture
around collaboration and transparency is the foundation to a successful ITSM
implementation. By using the Atlassian suite, you’re already one step closer
to leading your organization toward open knowledge sharing. Open and
collaborative culture is infused in the Atlassian toolset. For example, Confluence
pages have open permissions by default, which enables team members to easily
access and collaborate in real-time.

2 Step back, and start where you are

As you define your organization’s culture and practices, ITIL 4’s Guiding Principles
are a great place to begin. (In fact, we found them to be quite similar to the
Agile Manifesto!) One of these principles is, “Start where you are.” With 34 ITIL 4
management practices to consider, it can feel overwhelming. Instead of building
from scratch, take a moment to observe and analyze the services, methodologies,
people, and tools you already have. Then use these insights to identify where to
start and what to continue, change, or build upon.

3 Take a top-down approach starting with the service layer

When beginning an ITSM deployment, the idea of fully defining your service
model down to the infrastructure can be paralyzing. Instead of diving into
infrastructure and microservices out of the gate, focus on the top services most
critical to your business (such as an e-commerce platform if you’re a retailer). To
identify these services, review tickets from the past few months to understand
which services are most utilized.

INTRODUCTION 13
4 Achieve quick wins with a minimal viable product
For many organizations, getting employees to embrace change can be difficult.
Maximize your chances for success by taking an agile approach to deploying
your ITSM solution. Instead of rolling a full-blown solution at once, identify your
organization’s biggest pain points, and focus on the practice, service, or use case
that will be most impactful. By starting with a minimal viable product (MVP) and
iterating on the solution over time, you’ll help your organization overcome the
fear of change while satisfying a significant portion of your stakeholders.

5 Match your software stack to your maturity and needs

According to Gartner, Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) leaders overpay by
$600 million on buying unused features of ITSM tools. Instead of committing
upfront to a costly ITSM platform with complex features you’ll never use, take
an adaptive approach to build your solution. The needs of your business are
constantly changing — so buy only what you need. Atlassian’s ITSM solution offers
out-of-the-box ITIL practices with the flexibility to scale as you grow. And, our
broad ecosystem of Marketplace apps allows you to customize and extend your
capabilities, without the need for specialized consultants.

6 Scale your solution and celebrate success

As you continue on your journey, communication is critical to increasing adoption.
Once a service or practice is up and running, shout it from the rooftops. Offer
hands-on training, pass out stickers, and incentivize usage through contests. As
Jira Service Management gains adoption, business teams, from HR to Legal, will
begin to realize the value and request service desks of their own. To manage and
scale this growth, treat each request as an endeavor of shared objectives. Seek
first to understand the problem each team is facing, and solve it in a consultative
manner. Finally, don’t forget to celebrate each milestone with your team!

INTRODUCTION 14
 02
Service delivery
IT business management
With the rise of digital transformation comes many innovative ideas from
the business side of the organization. IT teams are at the center of this
transformation, supporting the demand for new services or application
changes. However, this influx of requests often results in unhealthy demand
management. As business stakeholders ideate and scope new ideas,
they often involve the IT organization too late, missing opportunities for
collaboration and leaving IT teams to play catch up. While the business tends
to ask for twice the capacity available, IT can only deliver half of the project
due to resource constraints determined way before the project started. As the
pace of innovation accelerates and business teams move even faster, IT faces
an ever-growing backlog and technical debt.

What is IT business management?

IT business management is the discipline of delivering business value from

IT workflows and tools. The goal is to create value for customers through
technology by addressing business goals, strategies, and needs.

According to ITIL 4

“Successful project management is important as the organization must

balance its need to:

·  Maintain current business operations effectively and efficiently

·  Transform those business operations to change, survive, and compete

in the market place

·  Continually improve its products and service”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.1.8, Project management

SERVICE DELIVERY 16
As software development begins to play a more prominent role in every
company, techniques such as lean, agile, and DevOps are spilling beyond their
software origins into the domain of IT project management. Not only do these
methods bring modern practices, tools, and jargon, they also introduce crucial
questions such as:

· How does the Project Management Office (PMO) strike a balance between
incoming business demand and IT’s capacity to deliver?

· How do you tackle big, audacious projects while empowering teams to

execute them iteratively and incrementally?

· How do software and IT projects fit into the broader context of business

· planning? Do the right teams have a “seat at the table”?

We find that organizations are living with traditional management

assumptions that no longer apply. As IT organizations reconsider how to
source, prioritize, and flow work to teams, Atlassian offers tools to enable
business and IT teams to better communicate, collaborate, and manage
project and IT work intake.

· With Jira Service Management, IT teams can easily capture business

requests for new technology, enhancements, and bug reports. Our tools
also use visual boards to see the flow of work and bottlenecks.

· Jira Software is used by IT and software teams to manage project work

via kanban boards, while business teams use Trello’s simple drag-and-
drop cards to communicate project status with stakeholders.

· Finally, the Atlassian Team Playbook offers practices inspired by agile and
DevOps to help IT teams gain a “seat at the table.”

IT business management checklist

Easily capture strategic business requests with self-service

Adopt practices to open collaboration between IT and business

Use queues and automation to prioritize strategic business requests

Embrace agile project management to speed up delivery

Use visual boards to collaborate and communicate with stakeholders

SERVICE DELIVERY 17
Easily capture strategic business
requests with self-service
Imagine one of your business partners has a great idea for a new service to
expand customer reach and accelerate business growth. Or, perhaps a service
owner needs a business application upgrade to expand capacity to meet this
year’s sales objective. How easy is it for them to raise a request with your IT
team?

Jira Service Management brings business, IT, and development teams together
with a single self-service portal to capture everything from strategic requests
to enhancements to bug fixes. This approach makes it easy for business teams
to interact with IT and initiate the collaboration process for new services and
requests.

Business stakeholders can easily raise a request by filling out an intuitive Jira Service Management form,
based on customized questions from the IT team.

SERVICE DELIVERY 18
Adopt practices to open collaboration
between IT and business
As market competition increases, speed is the name of the game. Business
units and IT teams can no longer operate in silos. For high performing IT teams,
the secret to fast and efficient project delivery is a strong alignment between
IT and the business. Not surprisingly, Gartner predicts 50% of organizations
will experience increased collaboration between business and IT teams by 2022.

The Atlassian Team Playbook offers multiple IT-focused plays to encourage

collaboration while working through complex business initiatives. When a new
business request arrives in your queue, consider trying out these following plays:

· IT Project Poster: This is a living document in Confluence shared with your

stakeholders. Update it as you explore your problem space, challenge
assumptions, validate solutions, and gather feedback together with your
stakeholders.

· Capacity Planning: As an IT team, you’re continually balancing work on

special projects with queue-based work that never seems to go away.
This play helps you understand your team’s actual capacity and guides
estimation and prioritization.

· IT Project Kickoff: Set your IT project up for success by aligning your team
on milestones, scope, and purpose.

· Retrospective: After your project is completed, take time as a team to

reflect on what went well and what to improve next time.

SERVICE DELIVERY 19
Let’s take a look at this IT Project Poster for a new e-commerce application
to support the company’s market expansion. Given the complexity of the
initiative, the Project Poster is an excellent starting point to facilitate a
collaborative session with your business stakeholders. Together, the service
owner and business stakeholders will define the problem to be solved, ideate
solutions, create milestones, and assign owners for each task. By breaking
down a massive project proposal into more manageable, smaller projects,
you’ll reduce the amount of unplanned work while improving the quality of
the deliverable. As you move from scoping into execution mode, this approach
ensures all parties have a shared understanding and vision for the project. Just
as important, it can also give business stakeholders increased visibility into
your IT team’s impact on the overall business.

SERVICE DELIVERY 20
Use queues and automation to prioritize
strategic business requests
The ever-growing demand for new services and enhancements can quickly
fill an IT team’s backlog. In many cases, these business requests are bundled
as major projects with a significant amount of work. This leads to unhealthy
demand management that tends to drive larger IT projects and slows down
the flow of work.

Jira Service Management queues and automation allow the IT organization to

manage requests efficiently and prioritize what’s most important. Queues let
IT and engineering teams represent the flow of requests to best match their
needs. Based on information submitted in the business request, automation
can be used to calculate business risk and flag strategic requests that require
further review. Managing IT project work intake using Jira Service Management
helps business units and IT teams to balance the current load of projects with
future capacity.

Queues allow IT teams to move requests through the appropriate review and approval stages.

SERVICE DELIVERY 21
Embrace agile project management
to speed up delivery
While IT teams have traditionally used the Waterfall model of fixed, sequential
phases, many teams are shifting to agile project management. Instead of a
single, high-risk release, these teams put value in the center and break work
into smaller increments and iterations. They are open to change and evolving
requirements based on feedback and testing. They also realize the benefits of
continuous learning from shorter cycle times.

Waterfall
REQUIREMENTS

DESIGN

DEVELOPMENT One big

outcome
TESTING at end

DEPLOYMENT OUTCOME

Agile
DE

DE

DE
VEL

VEL

VEL
TESTING

TESTING

TESTING
OPMEN

OPMEN

OPMEN
T

REQUIREMENTS DESIGN DEPLOYMENT REQUIREMENTS DESIGN DEPLOYMENT REQUIREMENTS DESIGN DEPLOYMENT

OUTCOME OUTCOME OUTCOME

Cumulative outcomes

A recent report from Deloitte found that 56% of CIOs expect to implement
agile, DevOps, or other flexible delivery models, to increase IT responsiveness
and promote innovation. While some companies adopt agile methodologies
organization-wide, others take a softer approach. Agility becomes a state of
mind that focuses on nimble, flexible practices that allow teams to adapt to
changes quickly.

You may not be able to switch entirely to agile, but a hybrid approach to
project management is beneficial. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers
benchmarks, agile teams experience 20% improvement in time to market, up
to 95% productivity, up to 29% lower costs, and lower defect rates.

SERVICE DELIVERY 22
Not sure where to start? Here are a few agile best practices to try today:

· Break up project work into smaller pieces. Instead of upfront

requirements and completing them in a “big bang” release, plan in buckets
of work organized by your value streams. Test a minimal viable product
(MVP) and work iteratively. Gather feedback at each phase to learn, adjust,
and build the capabilities for the next phase.

· Adopt team stand-up meetings. Start your day with a quick status update
where team members can stay informed about each other’s progress,
flag blockers, and share in individual successes. For distributed or remote
teams, stand-ups over video conferencing or chat work equally well. Try
the Stand-up Meetings play from the Atlassian Team Playbook.

· Use kanban boards to manage the flow of work. Jira Software uses
kanban boards, a popular framework in agile software development, to
visualize work and optimize the flow of the work among the team. Work
items are represented visually so that team members can see the status
of each piece of work, at any time.

With interactive drag and drop capabilities, kanban boards allow teams to
prioritize and progress work through its lifecycle. Each ticket (or card) can be
color-coded to bring attention to criteria such as severity or SLAs. Agents use
filters to set custom views and quickly find the tickets they need.

SERVICE DELIVERY 23
Use visual boards to collaborate and
communicate with stakeholders
On the business side, Trello is a great visual collaboration tool to help IT teams
communicate and align their projects with business stakeholders. This type
of board allows stakeholders to stay informed as IT teams move through
scoping, designing, and building out new business services. Drag-and-drop
functionality, commenting, and attachments make collaboration seamless.
Assigned owners, statuses, and due dates provide visibility and transparent
communication.

IT and business teams collaborate on a Trello board to manage requests from the business.

SERVICE DELIVERY 24
Change enablement
We’re in an age of cloud and digital transformation, yet many IT organizations
are struggling to keep pace with the rate of change. And as the impact of poorly
planned changes on outages grows, so does the implementation of formal
change processes to protect the business from adverse changes. However,
despite these good intentions to reduce risk, improve stability, and track
changes for compliance, the result has been a heavyweight, complex, and
bureaucratic process for making changes to software and production systems.

What’s more, these processes create a different type of risk — the danger of
bringing important updates and enhancements to the market too slowly.
Traditional change management processes also frustrate and slow down
software developers, especially those practicing DevOps. Instead of shipping
code that customers will appreciate, they find themselves spending too much
time doing paperwork and waiting to see if what they built will get used.

This has led to dysfunctional ways of working, such as:

· Normal changes comprised of large batches of work, which result in

long lead times

· Siloed tools that hinder coordination and handoffs between development

and IT teams

· Unnecessarily wide freeze windows for changes, which come from the
belief that fewer changes result in more stable systems

· Change approvals made by individuals detached from those doing the

work, leading to unclear responsibility and accountability

· Overburdened Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings with long backlogs

of change reviews

· The rise of a command and control culture focused on processes and

maintaining the status quo

· The lack of continuous improvement practices

· Reactionary decision making based on emotions and politics, instead

of metrics and value

SERVICE DELIVERY 25
 What is change enablement?

Change enablement — also known as change management — is an IT

practice designed to minimize risks and disruptions to IT services while
making changes to critical systems and services. A change is adding,
modifying, or removing anything that could have a direct or indirect effect
on services.

Common types of changes:

·  Standard change: Pre-approved changes that are low risk, performed

frequently, and follow a documented process. For example, adding
memory or creating a new instance of a database.

·  Normal changes: Non-emergency changes that require further review

and approval by the CAB, such as migrating to a new data center or
making performance improvements.

·  Emergency changes: Changes that arise from an unexpected error or

threat that needs to be addressed immediately. Think implementing
a security patch or dealing with a server outage.

According to ITIL 4

“Change enablement must balance the need to make beneficial changes

that will deliver additional value with the need to protect customers and
users from the adverse effect of changes… In high-velocity organizations,
it is a common practice to decentralize change approval, making the peer
review a top predictor of high performance.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.2.4, Change enablement

SERVICE DELIVERY 26
Improve the flow of work with
adaptive change enablement
As software development plays a larger role in every company, following an
efficient and adaptable change enablement practice is increasingly important.
In this dynamic environment, providing a superior customer experience is a
key differentiator, and shipping value to customers faster becomes critical for
success. It’s all about balancing risk with moving fast.

To start, stop treating change as a “one size fits all” approach. Treat each
change differently based on the level of risk, and draw on data from previous
changes to make better decisions going forward. For example, which changes
are most successful, and why? Over time, by leveraging data, you’ll be
able to use pre-approvals and automation to ship changes faster without
compromising on risk.

You may also consider evolving the role of your Change Advisory Board (CAB)
from a “gatekeeper” to an enabler of business outcomes. Instead of waiting
for the weekly CAB meeting, move the approval authority closer to the roles
responsible for the technology and service. Start using peer reviews, daily
standups, and automation to approve team-level changes. The role of the CAB
will begin to change. CABs become trusted advisors responsible for monitoring
change trends, developing effective team practices, and coordinating between
teams and their needs. Modern tools, such as Jira Service Management,
Confluence, and Slack, become the backbone of collaboration and approvals so
CAB meetings can be more strategic.

SERVICE DELIVERY 27
With a collaborative, intuitive, and integrated toolset, Atlassian’s platform
can support your transition from traditional change management processes
to a modern change enablement practice. By using one platform for IT and
software development, you can begin bridging the gap between ITSM and
DevOps. You can accelerate software delivery while managing risk and
maintaining compliance.

· Jira Service Management eases the intake of changes with an intuitive

service desk and automation for risk assessment and approval routing.

· Streamline workflows by integrating your service desk with CI/CD tools,

including Bitbucket. Once code is deployed, a change request is created
and risk is automatically assessed. If required, the change is flagged for
additional review.

· Use Confluence for cross-functional planning, templates for change plans,

and peer reviews. This reduces the reliance on a formal CAB process, as
relevant teams can now collaborate and gain visibility from a shared
source of truth.

· Link change requests directly to Jira Software for visibility and tracking of
software-related work.

· Finally, integrate with the right service and application data from Insight
CMDB.

Tip: Start improving the flow of IT changes

Begin by understanding the current state of your practices. Which teams are
closest to the work? Which part of the process is slowing you down? If you
mapped out your flow of changes in a value stream, where do you expect
to find bottlenecks? Answer these questions to uncover insights and know
which focus areas to improve.

SERVICE DELIVERY 28
 Change enablement checklist

Embrace practices to make standard change the new normal

Streamline change request intake for IT and developer teams

Adopt an automated risk model to prioritize changes

Break down complex changes into smaller units of work

Unlock learning with change metrics and KPIs

Move to the future of release management with DevOps change

SERVICE DELIVERY 29
Embrace practices to make
standard change the new normal
For many IT teams, the bulk of changes are considered “normal changes,”
which require longer lead times for initiating, planning, and approving the
change. Consider shrinking your backlog of changes by identifying and moving
changes into a standard change path.

Consider an example from a major European government agency, who is an

Atlassian customer and pioneer in digitizing public sector services. In their
journey to replace their legacy ITSM tool with Jira Service Management for
20,000 users, they decided to focus on modernizing their change enablement
practices. Through carefully analyzing changes from the previous year, they
discovered 70% of their changes could be pre-approved and automated
through a standard change path using Jira Service Management. This improved
the speed of the majority of change requests, while freeing up time to
prioritize improvements for the remaining normal changes.

SERVICE DELIVERY 30
 Tip: A step-by-step guide to making standard changes the new normal

1. Review your most common changes from the past three to six
months.

2. Select three to five standard changes as candidates to automate.

3. Configure self-service request types for standard changes in Jira

Service Management to make it easy for IT and developer teams
to initiate a change.

·  Request types should include fields to capture details of the

standard changes, such as change reason, dates, and a description.

·  Consider including a field for the impacted service or application,

such as from Insight CMDB.

4. Create automation rules to auto-approve the change, transition

the change status to implementation, and notify staff with
updates.

5. Train your IT staff and development teams on this improved

change intake process that streamlines standard changes.

6. Monitor performance and make improvements using Jira Service

Management reports.

7. Identify additional standard changes to automate by repeating

steps 1-6.

SERVICE DELIVERY 31
Streamline change request intake
for IT and developer teams
Legacy ITSM tools make it difficult for infrastructure, operations, and
development teams to raise a change request. Initiating the change request
process usually requires a lengthy form, which is time-consuming and
frustrating, especially for developers who need to switch between two tools.

With a self-service portal for IT and software teams, Jira Service Management
offers a convenient way to intake infrastructure change requests. In this
example, IT staff can easily choose from various change request types, such as
pre-approved maintenance updates, or production system upgrades requiring
further planning and review.

Use automation to take your intake process to the next level. By integrating
Jira Service Management with your CI/CD tools, automation allows
development code commits to create a change request, which are then triaged
effectively based on the appropriate process level for each change.

SERVICE DELIVERY 32
Adopt an automated risk model
to prioritize changes
By its very nature, changes to IT systems are sources of disruption risk. The
goal of change enablement is to accelerate the rate of changes while keeping
risks at an acceptable level. But to understand risk, you need a model to
evaluate the data and identify changes considered to be higher risk. That’s
where automation in Jira Service Management can help.

Some risk criteria are common across all organizations and found in most
change risk models, such as ‘urgency,’ ‘impact,’ ‘priority,’ and ‘impacted
application and service.’ Beyond these core criteria, you may need to consider
factors specific to your organization, such as regulatory or compliance
requirements. The request form in Jira Service Management allows you to
configure the questions and data needed to properly assess the risk of a
change.

To determine the risk of an update, include questions such as:

1. Will this change be completed during business hours?
2. Is this change easily rolled back?
3. Is testing completed for this change request?

SERVICE DELIVERY 33
Based on the responses, automation in Jira Service Management can be used
to calculate the level of risk of each change request and set the appropriate
risk value. You can also use automation to:

· Classify a change request as ‘standard,’ ‘normal,’ and ‘emergency,’ or by

service tier and dependencies

· Route change requests down the right Jira workflow path, such as pre-
approvals for standard changes and additional workflows for high-risk
normal changes

· Notify assigned stakeholders about high-risk changes which require

further review

· Interact with external systems, such as Slack or Workato, via webhooks

Using Jira Service Management automation, drag and drop workflows make it
easy to create powerful rules to extend and automate Jira — without the need
for custom scripts.

SERVICE DELIVERY 34
Break down complex changes
into smaller units of work
By deconstructing complex changes into smaller units of work, IT teams
can more easily control smaller changes, move them faster through the
change process, and reduce the level of risk. Confluence brings IT staff
and stakeholders together around complex work. They can create change
documents as a team, provide peer review and feedback, and iterate in real-
time until the change is implemented.

In this following example, a team has broken down a major change into
smaller tasks and pre-changes. They can create Jira issues, stories, tasks, and
changes right from the Confluence page, and add links to the change request
for ease of tracking. Confluence allows teams to turn real-time collaboration
into actionable work with ease.

SERVICE DELIVERY 35
Unlock learning with change metrics and KPIs
Each IT organization has a standard set of reports run on a regular basis to
understand the change work that has been completed. When measuring your
change enablement performance, focus on metrics that unlock learning and
improvements, such as:

Are changes realized in a timely and effective manner?

· Change success and acceptance rate over time

· Average change lead time

· Average length of time for change delivery by change type

What is the impact of changes to services?

· Number and duration of change-related incidents (e.g. change failure rate)

· Business impact of change-related incidents

Are we meeting change-related governance and compliance requirements?

· Number and criticality of change-related audit findings for non-compliance

· Number and impact for change-related compliance incident

To measure and learn from your changes, Jira Service Management provides
out-of-the-box reports, along with the ability to build and share custom
dashboards. Use Jira Service Management as a source of truth to bring
together data across your changes, incidents, services, and code.

SERVICE DELIVERY 36
Move to the future of release management
with DevOps change
Making changes to production systems can often be complex and
bureaucratic. It requires organizing work across multiple teams while
managing regulatory needs for critical business systems. But as organizations
adopt cloud and platform-as-a-service, the way teams deliver changes to
the IT infrastructure is rapidly evolving. Specifically, a growing number of
IT organizations are embracing DevOps to manage the release of code and
configuration changes effectively.

What is deployment management?

Deployment management is the practice of moving new or changed

hardware, software, or any other component to live environments. It
may also be involved in deploying components to other environments for
testing or staging.

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.3.1, Deployment management

To balance high stability and faster delivery, ITIL 4 introduces a new technical
management practice: deployment management. In short, this approach
decouples deployment from release. All three practices are necessary to
deliver services. Change enablement helps coordinate technical changes,
deployment management looks at how to move service components from one
environment to another, and release management focuses on when and how
to make the components available to users.

SERVICE DELIVERY 37
Change Deployment Release
control management management
Expressed as code, in version Move to loosely coupled systems, A business decision to reveal
control as audit trail with isolation and reliability value to users(or revert)

What changes? How to deploy changes? How to affect release?

Toggle a
Code Packages
feature flag

Infrastructure Configuration Change an

configuration management environment
reference

Infrastructure Virtualized Toggle a

component infrastructure router

Continuous delivery

To balance high stability and faster delivery, ITIL 4 introduces a new technical
management practice: deployment management. In short, this approach
decouples deployment from release. All three practices are necessary to
deliver services. Change enablement helps coordinate technical changes,
deployment management looks at how to move service components from one
environment to another, and release management focuses on when and how
to make the components available to users.

Bundling changes into huge releases increases the possibility of large

incidents, and makes it harder to find the source of a problem when one arises.
Smaller, more frequent releases can limit the scope of a potential incident. For
example, canary deployments are a great way to roll out a release to a small
subset of users as a test before fully deploying it.

Another technique is blue-green deployments, which releases applications

reliably while reducing any downtime for users. Simply put, you have two
identical production environments. The “green” environment hosts your current
production apps, while you deploy and run tests for the new app in your “blue”
environment. When you’re ready to go live, change your load balancer to
point to “blue.” If there are any failures, you can easily roll back to the “green”
environment.

SERVICE DELIVERY 38
As your organization begins embracing the concept of “DevOps change,”
you have a unique opportunity to reshape your current change model. With
DevOps, you can leverage automated pipelines for Continuous Integration
and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to shift even more work to the pre-authorized
“standard change” path. This requires a shift in mindset for both IT and
development teams to ensure their practices come together. From the
DevOps perspective, change enablement becomes more tightly coupled to
infrastructure as platform-as-a-service (PaaS) becomes a standard. And when
dealing with code changes, more detailed specifications, greater collaboration
during planning, and increased awareness of compliance needs can help
reduce risk, while allowing automation to make the implementation as fast as
clicking a button. As a result, infrastructure as code becomes faster, without
compromising quality.

Integrate your CI/CD tools with Jira Service Management

Many developers encounter roadblocks as they get ready to ship code for
production. They are forced to stop their work, switch tools to create a
change ticket, and then wait for someone to approve the code for release.
By integrating Jira Service Management with CI/CD tools, such as Bitbucket
Pipelines, Jenkins, and CircleCI, developers now have a streamlined change
management process right in their existing workflows. Changes are
automatically registered as requests in Jira Service Management, and a
complete audit trail of changes deployed to production is possible.

Using Automation for Jira, your organization can configure rules to assess
and score the risk of each software change automatically. Set up rules to auto-
approve and deploy low-risk changes, while funneling high-risk changes for
further review and approvals. There’s no more finger-pointing or waiting days
on end for a simple change to make its way through. Barriers are removed and
agility is realized, all while minimizing risk.

Jira Service Management automatically pulls in the relevant information —

such as change details directly from the CI/CD tool, impacted services, the
change risk score, and change approvers — right in the change request. Now
change managers have all the context they need to approve changes or Using

*Available in Jira Service Management Cloud plan

SERVICE DELIVERY 39
*Available in Jira Service Management Cloud plan

Using Automation for Jira, your organization can configure rules to assess
and score the risk of each software change automatically. Set up rules to auto-
approve and deploy low-risk changes, while funneling high-risk changes for
further review and approvals. There’s no more finger-pointing or waiting days
on end for a simple change to make its way through. Barriers are removed and
agility is realized, all while minimizing risk.

Jira Service Management automatically pulls in the relevant information —

such as change details directly from the CI/CD tool, impacted services, the
change risk score, and change approvers — right in the change request. Now
change managers have all the context they need to approve changes or
request additional review. Your developers can also track the progress of
the request, right from their CI/CD tool such as Bitbucket.

*Available in Jira Service Management Cloud plan

SERVICE DELIVERY 40
And in the case of an outage, Jira Service Management automatically provides
a strong change log for incident management. Through the integration, IT
operations and development teams can access all relevant changes in one
place, empowering them with detailed context to quickly resolve and recover
from the outage. By putting developers and IT on the same platform, Atlassian
offers a unique approach to change enablement by automating that last mile
that’s essential for responding to business changes fast.

SERVICE DELIVERY 41
Service configuration management
In an era of cloud computing and anything as a service, IT teams are now
managing a very different type of IT environment. While they may rely on a
Configuration Management Database (CMDB), many IT organizations struggle
to find value from their CMDB implementations and have even experienced
failed CMDB projects. They’re not alone. According to Gartner, 80% of CMDB
initiatives fail. The reason stems from starting a CMDB deployment with
too wide of a scope. As a result, teams attempt to collect large amounts of
information (valuable or not) upfront and struggle to maintain and keep it
current. The deployment ultimately shows little value for the organization and,
instead, results in lengthy projects and wasted resources.

What is service configuration management?

Service configuration management ensures that accurate and reliable

information about the configuration of services, and the configuration
items (CIs) that support them, is available when and where it is needed.
This includes information on how CIs are configured and the relationships
between them. This high-level view is often called a service map or service
model, and forms part of the service architecture.

According to ITIL 4

“It is important that the effort needed to collect and maintain configuration
information is balanced with the value that the information creates.
Maintaining large amounts of detailed information about every component,
and its relationships to other components, can be costly, and may deliver very
little value. The requirements for configuration management must be based
on an understanding of the organization’s goals, and how configuration
management contributes to value creation.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.2.11, Service configuration management

SERVICE DELIVERY 42
Take a top-down approach to build your
service model architecture
To realize more value from your CMDB, focus on pulling in data from only the
key services you plan to manage. Take a lean approach by starting with one
or two of your most critical business services. This narrow focus helps you
learn as your CMDB grows, and quickly build a service map with relevant CIs
and dependences. More importantly, you’ll avoid the pitfall of overloading the
CMDB with unnecessary data.

The concept of data federation has also become a reality for many IT teams.
Applications such as AWS Management Console or Microsoft Azure Portal
empower teams to quickly access the IT infrastructure supporting their
services. This “service-centric” approach to defining and building out your
CMDB balances the information required with the value that the information
creates. It also avoids the costly efforts of maintaining large amounts of
detailed information about every component and its relationships.

Tip: How to embrace a service-focused CMDB strategy

· Connect your service configuration management goals to

business goals.

· Work with all relevant stakeholders, from service owners to

business leaders to security.

· Think ahead — consider what services you need in the future

and where to grow your service model.

· Start where you are. Be selective, begin small, and learn as

you grow.

· Embrace agility along with scalability.

· Use discovery and automation to identify CI relationships.

· Adopt a data federation strategy to prevent overloading your

CMDB with data.

· Determine an audit mechanism to ensure accurate, real-time data.

· Use retrospectives to learn from changes and incidents.

· Publish your learnings and share improvements with

business leaders.

SERVICE DELIVERY 43
Create a unified service view
across your organization
With the Service Registry, Jira Service Management provides the ability to easily
register important business and technical services that power your business.
Built on the Atlassian Graph platform which connects, queries, and consolidates
data across Atlassian and third-party products, the Service Registry increases
service visibility across your organization, unifies the work of IT and development
teams, and opens up team collaboration around business-critical needs. It
provides immediate access to service information, including:

· Service knowledge base — Detailed, consolidation information about each

service, its dependencies, and how a team’s code and responsibilities
fit together. This allows developers to understand their code and other
teams’ code more easily.

· Service-aware development — Speeds up development processes by

allowing users to track their work against services and quickly access
service information where needed.

· Smarter incidents — Allows response teams to resolve incidents faster

by viewing affected services, blocking pipelines for those services, rolling
back deployments, and quickly accessing runbooks.

· Service-aware reporting — Identify problems and improve workflows by

accessing reports for service health, deployment time, and deployment
blockers.

*Coming to Jira Service Management Cloud plan

SERVICE DELIVERY 44
Extend your solution with a flexible CMDB
With Insight (now by Atlassian), you can build your CMDB within the Jira
environment itself and streamline workflows by having everything integrated
into one tool. Insight’s flexibility allows you to define the data structure your
teams need, such as CIs, attributions, relationships, and dependencies. With
ease, teams have relevant services and applications they need to inform
their IT support practices. You can then link these CIs to Jira issues to provide
additional context for agents to solve issues faster. The greater the context,
the faster agents can work.

Whether you’re analyzing the risk of an upcoming change, fixing an urgent

incident, or conducting root cause analysis for a suspected problem, Insight
shows your dependencies to make it easier and faster to assess the situation.
Use automation to assign issues directly to service or CI owners, create issues
if a key service goes down, or add new CIs based on data in a Jira form.

With integrations, importers, and network discovery tools, Insight helps with
data federation and getting up-to-date information about your CIs.

Insight is also used by IT organizations to serve their asset and inventory

management needs.

SERVICE DELIVERY 45
To get all your important data into the CMDB and create a single pane of glass,
Insight offers importers for CSV and JSON files and third-party integrations
out-of-the-box. Integrations include leading cloud providers (AWS, Azure, and
Google Cloud) and other existing solutions for asset management and CMDB
(ServiceNow and Device42).

If you don’t already have a third-party tool to scan your network, Insight
Discovery offers an agentless scanner that can be run on a schedule to build a
map of your IP-enabled devices and their dependencies. It can import them into
the Insight CMDB and even trigger notifications when it discovers changes!

Insight Discovery can detect a range of CIs, such as devices, appliances,

operating systems, CPU information, and users. It can also uncover the various
details and relationships among them. If needed, you can also create a custom
scanning pattern for Insight Discovery.

By using Insight with Jira Service Management, create a federated CMDB to

support your organization’s configuration and asset management needs.
Empower data teams to manage their IT infrastructure, while enabling business
leaders to report on customers, inventories, finances, change management, and
more. For IT teams, tracking assets from servers to mobile devices with synced
CIs is a breeze.

SERVICE DELIVERY 46
Knowledge management
Half a decade ago, renowned management consultant Peter Drucker predicted
the “the shift to a knowledge society,” one where information changed the
way people work and value is generated through our minds. Fast forward to
today, where we see the reality of knowledge workers. Employees demand
more access to information to solve both simple and complex questions daily.

According to Forrester, on average, 20% of a knowledge worker’s time is

spent looking for information, which disrupts productivity, efficiency, and flow.
Modern enterprises are often made up of tangled interactions between IT,
suppliers, accounting, procurement, and more — leading to major headaches
from employees needing to navigate complex workflows and systems.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is the process of creating, curating, sharing, using,

and managing knowledge across an organization.

A knowledge base is the foundation of a knowledge management practice.

It’s a self-serve online library of information about a product, service,
department, or topic, including FAQs and troubleshooting guides.

According to ITIL 4

“‘Knowledge’ is not simply information. Knowledge is the use of information

in a particular context. Knowledge management aims to ensure that
stakeholders get the right information, in the proper format, at the right level,
and at the correct time, according to their access level and other relevant
policies.

This requires a procedure for the acquisition of knowledge, including the

development, capturing, and harvesting of unstructured knowledge, whether
it is formal and documented or informal and tacit knowledge.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.1.4, Knowledge management

SERVICE DELIVERY 47
Knowledge management to empower
team culture and collaboration

Knowledge is one of your organization’s most valuable assets. Specifically,

knowledge is more powerful when sharing is open, when it’s no longer an
individual’s knowledge but the community’s knowledge. But as workplace
technology evolves, knowledge now exists in so many different places — across
email, tickets, and in the minds of individual team members. While aggregating
your team’s knowledge in a single repository is a great first step, tooling is often
not enough unless you have a strong culture of open knowledge sharing.

While company culture can take time to change, building the right knowledge
sharing practices into the way that teams, leadership, and individual employees
work will set you in the right direction. The first step is understanding how your
company views information. Are teams encouraged to be generous, or secretive,
with what they’re learning? These are the differences between an open-handed or
closed-fist approach to knowledge, and it’s important to determine where your
company lands as you rethink your knowledge management strategy and practices.

At Atlassian, our teams openly share what they’re learning. This includes
divulging wins and failures from experiments, sharing data from team research
initiatives, and being transparent about both positive and negative results
of projects. Open sharing also helps teams to grow as they benefit from the
knowledge being gathered.

Confluence gives teams a workspace where knowledge and collaboration

meet to accomplish great things. IT organizations embrace Confluence as their
knowledge management platform to:

· Empower teams to structure information in ways that best fit the way
they work.

· Create a source of truth for their organization’s collective knowledge and

make it easy to find answers.

· Help cross-functional teams tackle complex work and create actionable

plans by linking work in Jira.

· Move work forward and speed up the review process through real-time
collaborative editing, providing feedback through inline comments, and
tagging a team member for help.

· Gain visibility into their team’s decision-making by documenting context

and key decision levers.

SERVICE DELIVERY 48
A Confluence page created by an IT Operations team to collect and organize pages related to the team’s
practices, such as incident runbooks and post-incident reviews (PIRs).

Reimagine your organization’s

knowledge management strategy

Over the years, we’ve witnessed thousands of teams held back by inefficient
practices, inadequate tools, and negative work cultures. As we studied these
teams, we noticed these teams are often siloed, focus on productivity over
people, and rely on top-down decision making. In short, these are “closed” ways
of working. These teams were capable of far more than they were actually
delivering, and that’s where we wanted to help.

In contrast, we’ve encountered high-performing teams defined by positive

energy, mutual trust, and incredible agility. On these teams, information flows
freely and team members have access to the resources they need to get work
done. These teams work “open.”

SERVICE DELIVERY 49
To move towards open ways of working, consider these approaches:

· Increase transparency with open and shared information. Knowledge

should be easy for your entire organization to search, find, and create.
Encourage team members to collaboratively edit pages, give feedback
through inline comments, or at-mention teammates for peer review.

· Make work visible with cross functional team collaboration. For every
major initiative, create a DACI (decision making framework) or a project
poster to share your goals and progress with the rest of the team and
stakeholders. This is a living, accessible document that can help you
explore your problem space, define your scope, and get feedback.

· Champion a culture of knowledge sharing. Reward top Confluence

contributors with an on-going recognition program that values both
quality and quantity. Your leadership team can set a positive example by
regularly contributing updates and blogs in Confluence. Go a step further,
and encourage employees to interact directly with leadership by giving
feedback and adding comments on Confluence pages.

SERVICE DELIVERY 50
 03
Service operations
Incident management
In a software services world, it’s crucial to keep services up and running. More
and more customers are relying on your services to keep their own business
running, which means the pressure to keep the lights on is higher than ever.
According to a study by Gartner, the average cost of downtime is $5,600
per minute, which equates to over $300,000 per hour depending on your
company’s size, vertical, and business model. Every minute that passes during
an incident can be damaging to revenue, reputation, and end-user productivity.

What is incident management?

Incident management is the process of responding to an unplanned event

or service interruption to restore the service to its operational state.

· Incident: An unplanned interruption to a service or reduction in

the service quality.

· Major incident: An incident with significant business impact,

requiring an immediate coordinated resolution.

According to ITIL 4

“Effective incident management often requires a high level of collaboration

within and between teams. These teams may include the service desk,
technical support, and vendors. Collaboration can facilitate information-
sharing and learning, as well as helping to solve the incident more
efficiently and effectively.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.2.5, Incident management

SERVICE OPERATIONS 52
When running technology services today, IT teams are expected to maintain
24/7 service availability. But without the right data integrations, support teams
grapple with a lack of context to manage and solve incidents effectively. For
example, when a potential incident is raised, teams are frantically searching
for information across disconnected data and siloed tools. Without real-time
information that’s easily accessible, both IT Ops and Support teams face stress
levels at an all-time high.

Outside of tooling, how does your team respond when a major outage happens?
Establishing a strong incident management process is crucial to reducing the
impact of the incident and restoring services quickly. The key to improving
response is lowering mean time to resolution (MTTR) and streamlining root
cause analysis to prevent future outages. In fact, Forrester has found that 70% of
incident response time is spent within the Investigation and Diagnosis phase.

Respond, resolve, and learn from every incident

As software and services become increasingly complex, Atlassian has found

that high- performing teams adopt a collaborative and proactive approach
to plan, respond, and learn from every incident. Before an incident even
happens, start by establishing an incident plan that expedites your response
to major outages. During an outage, build customer trust with effective
external communications. Use open collaboration and knowledge sharing to
investigate and resolve the incident. Finally, learn from major outages through
post-incident reviews (PIRs).

SERVICE OPERATIONS 53
Atlassian’s platform for incident management brings all of the context and
data you need to resolve an incident right into your ITSM tool.

· Within a single portal, agents can manage issues and user-reported

incidents in Jira Service Management.

· Agents can quickly escalate major incidents as an alert to the on-call IT

Operations team. Through capabilities from our popular Opsgenie product,
Jira Service Management empowers IT and DevOps teams to stay in
control during an incident by centralizing alerts, notifying the right people,
and enabling them to collaborate and take rapid action.

· When it comes to communication, Statuspage helps build trust with every

incident by allowing teams to easily communicate when services break.

· Finally, Confluence’s shared workspace captures incident practices,

processes, and procedures in one place — from runbooks, knowledge
bases, and PIRs.

This seamless end-to-end incident management solution helps IT teams

escalate, bring in the right responders, swarm, and ultimately minimize
downtime.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 54
Beyond the technology, the Atlassian Incident Management Handbook offers
a great starting point to develop a complete practice for incident response.

Incident management checklist

Establish a proactive incident management playbook

Make it easy to capture user and system-reported issues

Reduce alert fatigue with smart on-call scheduling

Use ChatOps and runbooks to improve team coordination

Build trust with centralized external communication

Learn from the incident with a post-incident report

SERVICE OPERATIONS 55
Establish a proactive incident
management playbook
Plan your incident response strategy in advance. You’ll alleviate stress, keep
your team focused during the incident, and shorten time to resolution. Make
sure to include both operational and team-based collaboration practices:

· Identify your team’s Incident · Determine the core team

Values, such as collaboration, members on your incident
communication, and response team-of-teams.
“blameless” postmortems.
· Establish your PIR practices.
· Clearly define what qualifies
· Conduct blameless PIRs for
as a major incident.
all major incidents.
· Document your major
· Publish and share PIR learnings.
incident practices.
· Conduct major incident
· Establish your Incident
simulation drills.
Response Communications,
such as response templates
and communications for
stakeholders (both external
and internal).

SERVICE OPERATIONS 56
Make it easy to capture user and
system-reported issues
Jira Service Management is the source of truth for both minor and major
incidents. The customer portal captures user-reported issues in a complete
and consistent manner, with all of the necessary information the support team
needs to evaluate the incident. When employees or customers see an incident,
they can report it in Jira Service Management. From there, issues are ticketed
and routed to the right agent queues.

When it comes to detecting issues and outages early, effective monitoring is

the eyes and ears for IT Operations. For system-detected incidents, Jira Service
Management easily integrates with over 200 app and web services, such
as Datadog, Sumo Logic, and Nagios, to sync alert data and streamline your
incident workflow.

And if your IT support agent in Jira Service Management determines that

an incident may require more attention, they can simply escalate it to the
incident management team — while retaining all of the valuable context — so
that the proper service team can begin swarming on the issue.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 57
Jira Service Management brings in all of the context you need from Opsgenie
so agents can even search to see if a related major incident is already
occurring in Opsgenie and link to it.

There’s no more jumping between your ITSM tool and your monitoring and
alerting system. All major incidents in Opsgenie are automatically pulled into
Jira Service Management, providing a holistic view of all current and past
major incidents.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 58
Reduce alert fatigue with smart
on-call scheduling
When on-call staff are inundated with irrelevant alerts, they start getting
alert fatigue and miss important notifications. Jira Service Management’s
built-in capabilities from ensures your team never misses a critical alert. By
building schedules and defining escalation rules within one interface, your
team always knows who is on-call and accountable during incidents. The
solution groups alerts, filters out the noise, and notifies team members using
multiple channels, such as text, phone call, mobile push or email, along with
the relevant context needed to immediately begin resolution.

Easily create on-call schedules, routing rules, and escalations, so you can be confident that critical alerts will
always be acknowledged.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 59
Use ChatOps and runbooks to
improve team coordination
Do you dread the 3 AM phone bridge to troubleshoot a major outage? Gone
are the days of physical war rooms and NOC call lists. IT teams have now
adopted integrated communication tools and processes, like ChatOps, to
improve support operations and flow.

Tip: How to shape team collaboration with ChatOps

1. Drop your phone bridge and use ChatOps, such as through Slack,
for service outage incident response.

2. Deliver amazing service beyond your ticketing system with

dedicated chat rooms.

3. Make change management manageable with improved

collaboration.

4. Add chatbots and automation to save time completing

manual tasks.

5. Instead of throwing tasks over the wall, improve IT and

developer collaboration by working on the same platform.

With Jira Service Management, teams have a centralized place to collaborate,

share real-time information, and fast track resolution. Instead of navigating
fragmented one-on-one chat updates or scrolling through long conversation
histories, pre-define a video conference room for teams to chat dynamically,
assign roles, and even take decisive actions right in the interface. By attaching
runbooks to alerts, teams can quickly launch standard remediation tasks,
either automatically or on-demand.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 60
With Opsgenie, teams have a centralized place to collaborate, share real-
time information, and fast track resolution. Instead of navigating fragmented
one-on-one chat updates, or scrolling through long conversation histories,
Opsgenie pre-defines a video conference for teams to chat dynamically,
assign roles, and even take decisive actions right in the interface. By attaching
runbooks to alerts, teams can quickly launch standard remediation tasks,
either automatically or on-demand.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 61
Runbooks are great for documenting common troubleshooting methods to
address alerts and resolve outages. By using Confluence for runbooks, your
IT staff has all the information they need to quickly triage an incident, right
at their fingertips. In many cases, teams can reduce incident resolution times
by 40%.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 62
Build trust with centralized
external communications
While communication within your response team is important, don’t forget
about keeping your customers and employees in the loop. With today’s
increasing number of managed services, maintaining mailing lists and fielding
individual responses are simply not scalable.

Get ahead of the surge of inbound support inquiries. Many IT teams use a
centralized dashboard, like Statuspage, to report on the status of critical
services. Statuspage works as a single channel for clear and proactive mass
communication, along with automated notifications and updates. Instead
of worrying about sending announcements, IT teams can focus on fixing the
incident at hand.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 63
Statuspage keeps internal teams informed of both scheduled and unplanned
downtime as well. Employees can subscribe to updates, which promotes
consistent communication and reduces manual updates.

Additionally, you can add a banner in your Jira Service Management portal
to communicate with both internal and external stakeholders. This reduces
incoming support tickets and builds trust with your customers.

Finally, through an integration, Jira Service Management will trigger all

incidents to automatically update Statuspage and your customer portal
Jira Service Management when the incident is resolved.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 64
Learn from the incident with a
post-incident review
When service is restored and the incident is marked resolved, many teams
will dust off their hands and consider their job complete. But not so fast!
Conducting a post-incident review (PIR) is a crucial part of the incident
management practice to improve processes and prevent future outages.
Going through a PIR helps teams understand the contributing root causes and
document the incident for future reference. By identifying preventative actions
to implement, they can reduce the likelihood of recurrence and improve future
service quality.

Yet, according to Google, 70% of incident reviews are forgotten. Most PIRs are
buried in service tickets, chat threads, emails, or someone’s document folder.
The tasks that were key to preventing service outage from reoccurring never

Tip: Best practices for implementing a formal PIR process

· Establish a “blameless postmortem” culture where the goal is

team learning, not finding blame.

· Develop a repeatable PIR process which is simple to follow and

encourages collaboration.

· Improve visibility by linking all related items created from the

PIR to the original incident.

· Create troubleshooting documents and runbooks in your

knowledge base for future reference. Review often and keep
them updated.

· Identify preventive actions to reduce the likelihood of the

incident happening again. These should be worded in a way that
is actionable, specific, and bounded by time.

· Share your PIR results and progress with other teams through
reporting and dashboards.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 65
During an incident, it’s hard to stop during all of the action to get visibility
into what actually happened. With Jira Service Management, everything is
recorded so you get full visibility into the entire incident lifecycle with an
automatically generated incident timeline. Jira Service Management also
automatically creates a postmortem report with all the relevant fields from
root cause, lead-up, mitigation, resolution, and lessons learned.

Finally, don’t let your learnings fall to the wayside. Confluence provides an
environment for cross-functional teams to collaborate on a PIR. Standardize
your PIR process using a Confluence template to capture insights such as:

· What was the root cause of the incident?

· What was the overall impact of the incident?

· Did a change impact this outage? Does it require a problem investigation?

· What knowledge base articles do we need to publish?

· Should the team report any software defects to the development team?

· What followup IT tasks should we track?

To make reporting and documentation even easier, teams can export Opsgenie
PIRs right into Confluence pages. Dashboards and reports can also be created
for management to provide visibility and showcase the progress made for
improving key services.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 66
Problem management
Problem management is essential for identifying and understanding the
underlying causes of an incident as well as identifying the best method to
eliminate that root cause. An incident may be over once the service is up and
running again, but until the underlying causes and contributing factors are
addressed, the problem remains.

Traditionally, once an incident is resolved, many IT teams will create a problem

ticket and throw it over the fence to a problem management team. While the
intention to solve root causes and reduce incidents is correct, this model often
leads to gigantic backlogs of problem tickets and technical debt. Root causes
are often not investigated until long after the incident has happened.

What is problem management?

Problem management is the process of identifying and managing the causes

of incidents, in order to reduce the number and impact of future incidents.

According to ITIL 4

“Problems are prioritized for analysis based on the risk that they pose….
It is not essential to analyse every problem; it is more valuable to make
significant progress on the highest-priority problems than to investigate
every minor problem that the organization is aware of.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.2.8, Problem management

In many cases, your team may benefit from integrating your incident
management and problem management practices. This proactive approach
allows you to understand what led to the incident at the same time you work
to resolve it. By viewing problem management as an extension of your incident
management practice, you now have a single stream of work, instead of a
backlog. Prioritize problem management for major incidents and incidents
affecting your mission-critical services. And when teams are not in response
mode, downtime may be a good time to get ahead of problems and prevent
future incidents.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 67
 Problem management checklist

Blend incident and problem practices to improve service quality

Share lessons learned and improvements shiped

Blend incident and problem practices

to improve service quality
During an incident, IT teams are focused on restoring service as quickly as
possible. They don’t have time to slow down and search for the underlying root
cause. This is where the post-incident review (PIR) can help. By prioritizing PIRs
as part of your incident management practice, you can ensure all underlying
causes and contributing factors are addressed. A problem record in Jira Service
Management allows teams to track the progress of a PIR and gain metrics on
whether teams are delivering service improvements or stalling out when a
root cause is difficult to find.

Use Jira Service Management problem records to track and share progress of a PIR.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 68
Jira Service Management allows your IT operations team to easily link
incidents and changes that are related to the outage. You can also attach
corrective actions that resulted from the PIR, and track their progress. Jira
Service Management bringing IT and software teams together in one place,
they have full visibility to solve issues and ship service improvements quickly.

Link and view all issues, changes, bug fixes, and corrective measures related to the incident in one place.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 69
Share lessons learned and
improvements shipped
Easily share the status and results of your problem investigations using Jira
dashboards. Insights may include volume of resolved problems, active problem
investigations, and common reasons for incidents. This allows stakeholders to
follow your progress and successes over time.

Confluence serves as the source of truth for your organization when it comes
to documenting and sharing insights from problem investigations and PIRs.
Keep service owners and business stakeholders updated by creating a
single Confluence page to share insights such as problem work completed,
improvements shipped, and potential blockers.

Use Jira dashboards to visually share problem investigation trends with stakeholders.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 70
Use Confluence to provide stakeholders with visibility across your major incident problem investigations.

Tip: How to redefine your problem management practice

· Review trends in your problem investigation backlog, then

identify what types of work should continue or stop. Focus on
problems that deliver value and improve services.

· Establish a problem investigation standard for major incident PIRs.

· Implement automation rules to proactively create problem

investigations for PIRs.

· Try a retrospective to improve your team’s post-incident learning

and communication.

· Develop metrics and dashboards to provide service owners and

stakeholders with more visibility.

SERVICE OPERATIONS 71
 04
Service support
Request management
The consumerization of technology has forever changed employee
expectations and impacted the way IT and services teams support users.
In today’s world of on-demand services, employees now demand the same
speed and ease of support from their IT organizations that they’ve come to
expect from services like Netflix and Amazon.

Yet, many IT organizations still struggle to meet their customers’ lofty

expectations. For employees, the primary contact with IT support is often
email, and the ability to self-serve is nowhere to be found. On the backend,
IT teams struggle with configuring a service request catalog and keeping a
knowledge base updated. When siloed tools abound, coordinating service
requests across multiple teams becomes a major challenge.

What is incident management?

Request management practice helps organizations standardize the way

they respond, coordinate, and fulfill support requests.

·  Request fulfillment is the process of resolving a customer’s service

request and refers to managing the entire lifecycle of all service
requests.

·  The service desk provides the primary contact point with IT, where
employees ask for help or request services.

According to ITIL 4

“With increased automation and the gradual removal of technical debt, the
focus of the service desk is to provide support for ‘people and business’
rather than simply technical issues.

Service desks are increasingly being used to get various matters arranged,
explained, and coordinated, rather than just to get broken technology fixed,
and the service desk has become a vital part of any service organization.”

ITIL® Foundation: ITIL 4 Edition, 5.2.14, Service desk

SERVICE SUPPORT 73
Delivering delightful, consumer-grade service and support

The days of manual, untraceable IT support through email or walk-up help

desks are over. Modern service desks have evolved to embrace self-service
and multi-channel support. Technology enables the ability to “shift-left”
to deliver more value, while offering ease of access to channels like email,
service portals, chat, and knowledge bases. Automation drives faster request
fulfillment and empowers teams to auto-provision services, such as password
resets, account access, and software requests.

At Atlassian, we believe a strong Service Request Management practice is

customerfocused, knowledge-centric, and streamlined with automation. We
also encourage learning from metrics and KPIs to make data-driven decisions
and optimize service.

· Jira Service Management is where support teams receive and track

requests. User-friendly workflows classify each request and seamlessly
automate approvals or assign them to proper agent queues. Teams
collaborate to fulfill requests, and then measure and learn from critical
metrics to improve customer satisfaction.

· When Jira Service Management is combined with the power of

Confluence, knowledgecentric support becomes a reality. Support teams
are empowered to author and share knowledge articles and FAQs, process
and troubleshooting guides, team documentation, and more.

Outside of IT, the same request management practices can be scaled and
customized for Enterprise Service Management workflows, such as employee
onboarding, legal contract review, office supply ordering, and more.

Tip: Apply “value streams” to your service desk

To manage the flow of your work, map out a value stream, or journey
through various activities of the value chain, for your service desk.
First, identify request bottlenecks that slow down your request
fulfillment. Then add automation to streamline your workflow.

SERVICE SUPPORT 74
 Service management checklist

Shift left with self-service

Build a knowledge-centric service desk

Measure your support service with KPIs

Track assets by integrating with a flexible solution

Automate where you can, and streamline where you can’t

Extend service management beyond IT

SERVICE SUPPORT 75
Shift left with self-service
We experience self-service in our everyday lives, from self-checkout lines to
using an ATM. Now, these expectations for self-service are being applied to
IT organizations. To meet these expectations, try “shifting left” — the concept
of moving request fulfillment as close to the front line (and the customer)
as possible. For instance, a knowledge base with searchable articles can
work wonders in deflecting tickets. Customize your intake request forms to
capture all relevant information upfront, so you eliminate long back-and-forth
conversations. As your organization grows, shifting left not only improves user
satisfaction, it also drives down your costs.

Jira Service Management offers users a single place to go for help. Through a
centralized global customer portal, employees can easily access every service
desk, from IT Support to HR and Facilities. And if an incident occurs, IT teams can
post general notifications or outage announcements on the portal homepage to
keep employees informed. Users can track the status of their requests at every
step, view expected SLAs, and communicate easily with support teams.

SERVICE SUPPORT 76
Build a knowledge-centric service desk
As services grow in complexity, knowledge management can be one of IT’s
most valuable assets. Every employee needs fast access to information to
be productive in their jobs. And every agent needs to keep up with changing
technologies and processes to support users effectively.

When support teams integrate Confluence with Jira Service Management,

knowledge is put to work by deflecting requests or streamlining the request
process. Designed around search, Jira Service Management uses machine
learning technology called Smart Graph to recommend the right knowledge
base articles and request types as users search for answers or complete request
forms. The more users search in the portal, the better the results become. When
support teams put answers to common questions directly at users’ fingertips,
they encourage self-service that satisfies customers and reduces request
volume. This frees up time for agents to focus on solving more critical issues.

Jira Service Management also improves agent productivity by providing

immediate access to knowledge base articles right from an issue or request.
Based on the type of request, agents can choose from recommended
knowledge articles or search within existing articles to respond to the user’s
request. With Jira Service Management and Confluence, IT teams can easily
author new knowledge base articles and build a knowledge base library that
fits their users’ needs.

SERVICE SUPPORT 77
 Tip: Learn from your knowledge base to improve self-service

In Jira Service Management, run a report to understand the most

common support requests. Use the data to identify new knowledge
base articles that can be published to reduce ticket volume.

Bonus tip: Use Confluence analytics to find out which articles

received the most views and positive feedback. Recognize the
authors with rewards to encourage team members to contribute to
the knowledge base.

SERVICE SUPPORT 78
Measure your support service with KPIs
Measuring IT performance is critical — not only for tracking work against team
objectives — but also for demonstrating your team’s value to the rest of the
business. But with email, requests are scattered with no way to capture even
the most basic metrics like SLAs or size of backlog. For organizations using
legacy ITSM tools, disjointed tools across teams, such as Dev and IT, prevent a
single view for reporting. Building dashboards on these traditional platforms is
often cumbersome and complex.

What are Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the metrics chosen to gauge how
well a team performed against agreed standards, such as uptime, first-call
resolution, and time-to-recovery after service outages.

Besides, how do you know which IT metrics to choose? By attempting to

track every metric possible, IT teams sometimes lose focus. We suggest
measuring activities that are both aligned to the goals of the business and
encourage the right behaviors. For example, tracking mean time to resolution
(MTTR) is helpful. But in an effort to improve MTTR metrics, you don’t want to
incentivize your first-level support to close tickets too quickly before solving
the customer’s issue to their satisfaction.

Every team has different tracking and reporting needs. As a starting point, we
recommend these commonly used KPIs:

Service support metrics Incident management metrics

1. Mean time to resolve 1. Incidents over time

2. Mean time to respond
3. Size of request backlog
4. Created versus resolved
5. SLA success rate
6. Cost per ticket
7. CSAT (customer satisfaction)
2. Mean time between failures
3. Mean time to acknowledge
4. Mean time to resolve
5. % of incidents resolved
within SLA
6. % of outages due to incidents
7. Uptime

SERVICE SUPPORT 79
With powerful real-time reporting in Jira Service Management, you have
visibility into your team’s performance metrics to learn, adjust, and improve
your service. Use default reports to quickly compare metrics, such as issues
created versus resolved, time to resolution, met SLAs versus breached, and
more. Then build custom reports to query additional data combinations.
Compared to legacy platforms, many teams find creating and sharing
dashboards in Jira Service Management more intuitive.

Here are examples of reporting capabilities in Jira Service Management:

CSAT

To understand users’ satisfaction with the quality of support, CSAT (customer

satisfaction) is an important metric to measure. Customer feedback helps
identify strengths and weaknesses in service quality, engage and motivate
agents to improve scores, and understand if agents need mentoring and training.

Short, simple surveys are most effective in generating customer responses.

Jira Service Management provides a built-in satisfaction survey, consisting of
a 5-star rating with a brief comment field.

SERVICE SUPPORT 80
SLAs

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are great for tracking day-to-day progress.
SLAs define agreed-upon terms for services and manage customer
expectations, such as promising a response from support within 24 hours.

In Jira Service Management, teams have the flexibility to create SLA goals for
just about any combination of parameters. Instead of relying on consultants
for custom queries or updating hard-coded SLAs, configuring SLAs can be done
in-house and changed on the fly. Don’t even think about building elaborate
Excel spreadsheets. Easily track SLA performance with pre-built reports that
update in real-time.

SERVICE SUPPORT 81
Jira Dashboards

Jira Dashboards provide another alternative to configure and display accurate,

detailed information at a glance. Dashboards can be created system-wide or
shared with a group of users. To extend your reporting capabilities, explore
Atlassian Marketplace apps such as eazyBI.

SERVICE SUPPORT 82
Track assets by integrating
with a flexible solution
Too often, IT assets are tracked in many different places, by many different
people. Naturally, chaos and inaccuracy follow, and IT teams can’t make
informed decisions. As IT evolves, teams become more reliant on SaaS vendors
for critical services, and it’s necessary to track the consumption of “on-demand
services” in dynamic cloud environments. Asset management must adapt from
spreadsheets to more effective, modern practices.

With increased control, visibility, and assigned responsibility, teams can reduce
excess consumption, including overprovisioning and idle instances, to avoid
unnecessary costs. On average, software and hardware spending accounts for
20% of IT’s budget, which is why asset management is crucial to master.

What is asset management?

IT asset management (also known as ITAM) is the process of ensuring an

organization’s assets are accounted for, deployed, maintained, upgraded,
and disposed of when the time comes. Put simply, it’s making sure that the
valuable items, tangible and intangible, in your organization are tracked and
being used.

Every organization is different. Maybe you need to map complex dependencies

across an enterprise. Or you want to keep a record of intangible assets
like licenses and compliance documents to reduce risk. Or perhaps your
requirements are more straightforward and involve tracking an inventory of
computers.

Insight’s CMDB has the capabilities required for asset management, in

addition to configuration management. Whether you’re looking for a
lightweight tracker or an enterprise-grade system, Jira Service Management
and Insight empowers you to define your assets how you like and work with
them in whatever way suits you and your business best.

SERVICE SUPPORT 83
Help employees help you with easy asset selection

As the first line of interaction with your customer, your service desk should
offer exceptional user experiences through self-service. With Jira Service
Management and Insight, employees can easily select the right assets to
associate with their request. Agents will receive all the necessary context
to resolve the request, such as purchase date and previous issues linked to
that asset. The more context agents receive, the faster they can resolve
customer issues.

In this employee onboarding example, a manager can select the required hardware and software right in the
Jira Service Management request form.

A support agent can quickly view the assets and software needed to onboard a new employee.
This example is using data from Insight.

SERVICE SUPPORT 84
Use automation to track assets and monitor inventory

Use automation rules and input from Jira issues to update the Insight CMDB
with the required information to track your assets. When an employee
requests hardware, use automation rules to assign them as the owner of
the chosen item. No more wasting time on hunting down who has what or
updating spreadsheets!

Automation rules can also be used to assess what inventory you have in
stock, and trigger a request to ship hardware from another location or raise a
purchase order for the desired item.

SERVICE SUPPORT 85
Automate where you can,
and streamline where you can’t
According to a McKinsey study, 45% of work activities can be automated with
currently demonstrated technologies. These time savings represent $2 trillion
in annual wages. Imagine if you could take your current IT support activities
and automate a small fraction of them. What would that be worth to the way
your teams function? What would that mean to the business?

As enterprises feel increased pressure to stay ahead of the competition, they

can’t afford to waste time on manual tasks or navigating operational silos.
That’s where automation can transform the workplace by efficiently scaling IT
operations and support. While automation is a cornerstone of ITSM success,
many organizations find automation costly and hard to implement.

Jira Service Management provides a handful of out-of-the-box automation

rules to help teams get started. With a simple, intuitive UI, they can build
custom automation workflows without the need for programming or
a consultant. Over 60% of Jira Service Management customers rely on
automation to get work done. In fact, some customers use over two million
automation rules per month.

Get started quickly with pre-configured automation rules in Jira Service Management.

SERVICE SUPPORT 86
Through platform-level automation, Atlassian’s solutions can coordinate and
orchestrate workflows that span across all your teams — from developers to IT
operations to the rest of the business. This ensures all teams focus their time
on tasks that provide value to the business.

Tip: Recommended tasks to automate

· Common requests with the greatest pain points

· Requests that need additional attention from an agent or approver

· Requests that can be fulfilled through self-service

· Common incident management activity

· Standard change request approvals

· Keeping linked issues updated

Don’t forget to start small, learn from results, and build on your success!

No code, just drag and drop

Automation in Jira Service Management is a “no-code” capability. Drag and
drop “if-this-then-that” rules to automate your work and solve countless use
cases, without adding any complexity. It only takes a few clicks, whether
you need to auto-close old issues, keep service requests and tasks in sync, or
automate your entire release process across Jira Software and Bitbucket.

Example automation rules for common use cases

Use case Example rule

Keep Jira Service

If a task is associated with a completed request, update the
Management
parent request to “Done,” and notify the assigned support team.
requests up to date

Surface potential If the CTO raises an urgent issue, send a Slack message to the
problems before support channel. Then reclassify the issue with a higher priority
they escalate SLA.

Automate releases When a new product feature is released, close all dev issues
across your teams and notify sales and marketing teams about the shipped feature.

Provide advanced When a customer comments on a closed issue, respond with a

customer support personalized note and notify the assigned support team.

SERVICE SUPPORT 87
Streamlining employee service requests

Start by automating your response to common requests, such as

reclassifying requests, adding comments, or routing requests to the
appropriate queues. Automation not only saves time for the IT team, but
also improves communication with internal customers and their overall
satisfaction with support.

Employee onboarding is a use case that requires coordination across

multiple teams, from IT to HR to Facilities. Instead of creating separate
requests for desk setup, software provisioning, and more, a hiring manager
can raise a single request in the customer portal to prepare everything
needed for a new employee.

After the request is raised, an automation rule creates a corresponding service

request in the Facilities team project. The rule copies the description from
the original issue and adds a comment to the parent request to acknowledge
receipt. The two requests are linked to keep both sides updated on progress.

SERVICE SUPPORT 88
Atlassian’s automation capabilities can be extended with integrations to help
HR teams create consistent first-day onboarding experiences. For example,
when a new employee is added to BambooHR, a ticket is automatically
created in Jira Service Management to kick off onboarding. At the same time,
the employee is provided with the right user access permissions in Okta.

And when employees depart or hardware is misplaced, automation can reduce

security and compliance risks. For example, when a hardware device status in
Insight CMDB is changed to “Lost,” a corresponding Jira Service Management
issue is created, which sends an update to Jamf, a device management
solution. Jamf can lock and wipe the device to prevent any security violations.

Automation across Dev and IT

Atlassian’s automation engine plays a vital role in improving cross-functional

work between Dev and IT teams. Consider this scenario: your IT team discovers
a software bug during a problem investigation. By creating a linked issue
and an automation rule to keep the linked issues synced, both software and
IT teams have real-time visibility into the status of the bug fix. When the
software team transitions to the bug from “Backlog” to “In Progress,” the
problem investigation ticket is automatically updated to notify the IT team.

SERVICE SUPPORT 89
By linking issues, software and IT teams are always on the same page.

This automation rule example keeps linked issues synced, then notifies the IT Operations team’s Slack
channel when the bug fix is completed.

With Jira automation, IT and development teams shift from spending time on
reactive, manual work, to concentrating on more complex tasks. Automation
saves time for teams and delivers immense value to the business. problem
investigation ticket is automatically updated to notify the IT team.

SERVICE SUPPORT 90
Extend service management beyond IT
Today’s knowledge workers want easy access to information to get work done
and stay productive. However, navigating complex workflows and systems
across IT, accounting, procurement, and more, can be a massive headache. To
streamline these processes, many IT organizations are looking at their existing
ITSM solution to help solve non-IT issues. This growing market is called
Enterprise Service Management.

What is Enterprise Service Management?

Enterprise Service Management (ESM) extends ITSM processes and tools

across an organization to all teams. It defines operational best practices
for both internal teams and their customers, while removing organizational
silos. Common ESM use cases include human resources, facilities, and legal.

Jira Service Management offers an intuitive, cost-effective solution that’s

quickly scalable and easily maintained by non-technical teams. With codeless
setup and configuration, teams can spin up new services, a customer
portal, and related request forms, workflow rules, and reports almost
instantaneously. Instead of purchasing dedicated modules for each team,
Jira Service Management customers enjoy a single adaptable solution that’s
flexible enough to solve a wide variety of business problems.

Plus, integrations across the Atlassian platform connect requests across a

comprehensive digital pipeline, from planning, collaboration, task and product
development (Jira Software and Trello) to continuous delivery (Bitbucket),
knowledge management (Confluence), operations (Jira Service Management
and Statuspage). and asset tracking and inventory management (Insight).

The use of Jira Service Management tends to spread organically across

companies. Most often, IT is the first team to leverage Jira Service
Management for service management. As business teams interact with
the service desk as end-users, they quickly understand the value and begin
to request service desks for their teams, such as HR, Facilities, and Legal.
Eventually, Jira Service Management will expand even further to other
departments and use cases, from event planning to procurement to security.

SERVICE SUPPORT 91
 Did you know? In the Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management,
Atlassian is recognized as a “Strong Performer” with the strongest overall
strategy and a rapidly expanding market presence. Download the report.

A single place to find and ask for help

For your internal customers, first impressions happen in your customer portal.
It’s where employees go to troubleshoot, submit requests, and view a list of
services offered. In Jira Service Management, match your brand by customizing
the look and feel of the portal with a banner and color combinations.

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Get started quickly with purpose-built templates

Customers can leverage templates and workflows in Jira Service Management

that are purpose-built for business teams in HR, Legal, and Facilities. These
out-of-the-box capabilities give business teams autonomy to create, update,
and maintain their own service desk with minimal IT involvement.

HR and Facilities teams can use Jira Service Management to efficiently

manage tasks such as employee onboarding and fielding maintenance
requests. Legal teams can shift from manually chasing down signatures to
working collaboratively with an automated digital workflow.

HR teams can create an onboarding template and associated workflows within minutes.

SERVICE SUPPORT 93
Balance self-service cloud provisioning
with compliance and security

As the demand for cloud services grows, administrators need to balance the
high demand with managing risk and security. With the AWS Service Catalog
Connector, administrators can provision requests by connecting their AWS
portfolios and products to Jira Service Management workflows. Users can self-
service cloud products right in Jira Service Management, while administrators
maintain governance and oversight over AWS resources.

SERVICE SUPPORT 94
05
Resources
Atlassian Team Playbook
and IT Guides
Having the “right” tools and following the “right” processes often aren’t
enough. By building a strong culture and adopting team practices based on
collaboration and transparency, organizations can develop behaviors that
can make them resilient and more adaptable to change. Take your IT team
practices to the next level with these resources:

The Atlassian Team Playbook

With the Team Playbook, you’ll find tool-
agnostic techniques Atlassian teams use
every day to improve the way our teams work
together. Start by assessing your team’s health
against common attributions, and experiment
with self-guided workshops (called Plays) to
uncover team blindspots, improve processes,
and start important conversations for the future.

Take the Team Playbook for a spin

Atlassian’s Guide to ITIL 4

ITIL 4, the latest update to the popular ITSM framework,
is here! In this guide, Atlassian and AXELOS partnered to
explore what’s new in ITIL 4, and share tips and tricks for
bringing agility and collaboration into ITSM.

Get the guide

Atlassian’s Incident
Management Handbook
In a world where always-on services are expected,
it’s critical to have a fast, straightforward incident
management process. In this handbook, we’re sharing our
strategy for responding, resolving, and learning from major
incidents.

Get the handbook

RESOURCES 96
Extend your ITSM
solution with
Marketplace Apps
Customize your ITSM solution with over
1,000 apps from the Atlassian Marketplace
across categories such as portal customization,
advanced analytics, and time tracking. Explore
the most common apps used by Atlassian
customers to extend their ITSM solution:

Service Request

Extension for Jira Service Management

Extension for Jira Service Management improves security, usability and
appearance of the solution for customer support teams. Display more issue
details on the Customer Portal, set up permissions for various elements, and
build dynamic request forms.

ProForma
As service request catalogs grow in Jira Service Management projects, the
number of custom Jira fields can be burdensome for Jira admins. ProForma
provides dynamic forms and checklists in Jira and Jira Service Management,
without the need for custom fields. ProForma is great for customers exploring
enterprise service management (ESM).

Portal Customization

Refined for Jira

Refined for Jira provides tools to customize the customer portal — without
needing to code. Organize your service desk with a purpose-fit site structure,
use a simple, inbuilt theme editor to customize the layout, and engage
customers with a branded and user-friendly interface and themes.

RESOURCES 97
Asset & Configuration Management

Insight — Asset Management

Insight (now by Atlassian) is an enterprise IT service and asset management
solution built for Jira. It provides flexible asset structures, a highly customizable
CMDB, seamless automation, and real-time reporting. When used in conjunction
with Discovery, Insight’s agentless network scanning app, customers can
automate asset discovery and dependency mapping.

Device42
Device42 is a comprehensive agentless discovery system used for asset
management. Continuously discover, map, and optimize infrastructure and
applications across your physical, virtual, and cloud infrastructures, providing
accurate views of your IT ecosystem.

Reporting

eazyBI
eazyBI enables customers to create business intelligence data reports and
dashboards in Jira. It provides an easy-to-use report builder, custom charts and
dashboards, and powerful calculations. Analyze and visualize data from Jira
Software, Jira Service Management, and external data sources — all in one place.

Arsenale Dataplane
Arsenale Dataplane delivers powerful, intuitive Jira reports, allowing customers
to reach back in time and look at historical trends, the timing of transitions,
and project and team performance. It is equipped with both out-of-the-box and
custom reporting capabilities.

Automation

Automation for Jira

Automation for Jira (now by Atlassian) makes it easy to configure automation
rules in Jira without the need for custom scripts. For example, service teams can
use it to auto-assign issues or auto-close old support tickets.

ScriptRunner for Jira

ScriptRunner for Jira is a leading toolset for automating, enhancing, and extending
Jira. It allows the use of scripts to automate workflows, update fields, and perform
other actions in Jira. It also expands the functionality of other apps using APIs.

RESOURCES 98
ChatOps

Halp
Halp (now by Atlassian) is a conversational ticketing solution for modern teams.
Capture, prioritize, manage, track, and report on Jira issues and Jira Service Desk
requests directly from your team’s native communication environment such as
Slack.

Microsoft Teams for Jira

For teams using Microsoft Teams, integrating with Jira Service Management makes
it easy to collaborate and communicate. Create tabs with issues and track and
discuss your team’s progress in your channel without leaving Microsoft Teams.

Integrations

Elements Connect (formerly nFeed)

Elements Connect pulls data from any source, such as SQL databases or REST
APIs, and then populates custom fields in Jira. Common uses cases include
fetching data from a CRM or querying a CMDB for assets.

Knowledge Management

Comala Workflows
For teams using Confluence with Jira Service as a knowledge base, Comala
Workflows ensures your Confluence content is validated before publishing. It
enables teams to add reviews, approvals, and document control to Confluence
documents.

Time Tracking

Tempo Timesheets
Tempo is the market leader in automated time tracking and resource planning
solutions, giving organizations the insight they need to keep on top of project
costs, plan resources, and track customer costs and CAPEX.

RESOURCES 99
Enterprise Services
Each deployment of Atlassian’s ITSM solution is unique. That’s why we
offer a breadth of enterprise services to design, implement, and optimize
solutions for scale.

Enterprise Partners

Consulting, best practices, and technical configurations to ensure success in

ITSM deployments of all sizes. Enterprise Partners can help conduct hands-
on system integrations, deployments, and upgrades. They’ll also work with
your team to customize Atlassian software to your specific needs.

Find an Enterprise Partner

Support Services

Different levels of access to a dedicated team of support engineers,

providing flexible coverage for your mission-critical Atlassian applications.
Our experienced support team has strong knowledge of all products, known
issues, and workarounds ensuring the quickest time to resolve your issues.

Learn about our Support Services

Technical Account Managers (TAMs)

Experienced solutions advisors from Atlassian who partner with customers

to shape successful outcomes. TAMs can help you navigate your ITSM
journey, align your teams, and provide regular updates on product roadmaps.

Get started with a TAM

RESOURCES 100
Atlassian’s cheat sheet for
high-velocity ITSM
We’d like to leave you with a cheat sheet that summarizes best practices
needed to unlock high-velocity collaborative ITSM. Feel free to print out and
hang by your desk, or share with your colleagues!

Getting started with Atlassian’s ITSM solution

Embrace a team-centric approach to ITSM

Step back, and start where you are

Take a top-down approach starting with the service layer

Achieve quick wins with a minimal viable product

Match your software stack to your maturity and needs

Scale your solution and celebrate success

Key Metrics
Service support metrics Incident management metrics

Mean time to resolve Incidents over time

Mean time to respond Mean time between failures

Size of request backlog Mean time to acknowledge

Created versus resolved Mean time to resolve

SLA Success Rate % of incidents resolved

within SLA
Cost per ticket
% of outages due to incidents
CSAT (customer satisfaction)
Uptime

RESOURCES 101
Service delivery
IT business management
Easily capture strategic
business requests with
self-service
Adopt practices to open
collaboration between IT
and business
Use queues and automation
to prioritize strategic
business requests
Embrace agile project
management to speed
up delivery
Use visual boards
to collaborate and
communicate with
stakeholders
Service configuration management
Take a top-down approach
to build your service model
architecture
Create a unified service view
across your organization
Extend your solution with
flexible CMDB apps
RESOURCES
Change enablement
Embrace practices to
make standard change
the new normal
Streamline change
request intake for IT and
developer teams
Adopt an automated risk
model to prioritize changes
Break down larger changes
into smaller units of work
Unlock learning with
change metrics and KPIs
Move to the future of
release management
with DevOps change
Knowledge management
Increase transparency with
open and shared information
Make work visible with
cross-functional team
collaboration
Champion a culture of
knowledge sharing
102
Service operations
Incident management

Establish a proactive incident management playbook

Make it easy to capture user and system-reported issues

Reduce alert fatigue with smart on-call scheduling

Use ChatOps and runbooks to improve team coordination

Build trust with centralized external communications

Learn from the incident with a post-incident report

Problem management

Blend incident and problem practices to improve service quality

Share lessons learned and improvements shipped

Service support Atlassian Team Playbook

Service management Top Plays

Shift left with self-service Health Monitor

Build a knowledge-centric IT Project Poster

service desk
IT Project Kickoff
Measure your support
Capacity Planning
service with KPIs
Retrospective
Track assets by integrating
with a flexible solution Find more plays:
atlassian.com/team-playbook
Automate where you can, and
streamline where you can’t

Extend service management

beyond IT

RESOURCES 103
About the authors
Paul Buffington
Principal Solutions
Engineer, ITSM
Atlassian
As a member of the Atlassian
Enterprise team, Paul is
responsible for helping
customers redefine the shape of
modern ITSM. His passion for all
things IT is driven by 15+ years
of consulting in the industry. His
expertise spans the Atlassian
products but also goes beyond
the technology to helping teams
improve the way they work.
Paul enjoys spending time with
family and their three golden
retrievers on the Oregon coast.
Hiking and photography are a
perfect weekend fo
RESOURCES
Teresa Fok
Senior Product Marketing
Manager, ITSM
Atlassian
Teresa Fok is a product marketer
at Atlassian. From better
understanding customer needs
to helping them solve business
challenges with Atlassian
products, she’s passionate
about helping IT teams work
better to drive change in their
organizations. Teresa enjoys
architecture and design and
exploring the San Francisco Bay
Area. She holds an MBA from
the Haas School of Business at
UC Berkeley.
104
Jenna Cline
Head of IT Strategy & Programs
Atlassian

Jenna Cline is the Head of

IT Strategy & Programs at
Atlassian. In this role, she uses
a strategic and programmatic
approach for solving business
problems with technical
solutions, working directly with
the CIO to use IT as a business
enabler.

Jenna has more than 20 years

of experience from a variety
of communications and IT
roles, ranging from early-
stage startups to Fortune 100
companies. She holds a B.A. in
Organizational Communications
from North Central College.

RESOURCES 105
Whether you’re making the
switch from a legacy ITSM tool or
implementing a solution for the
first time, Atlassian can help you
modernize your IT practices and keep
up with the pace of business.

Ready to unlock high-velocity service

management? Learn more about
Atlassian’s ITSM solution on our website.

Additional resources
·  Case Studies: Reimagining ITSM with Jira Service Management

·  Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Service Management

·  Forrester’s Total Economic Impact™ of Atlassian for ITSM

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